Drilling

Down, over, & up. It's that easy.

Discover the new way of drilling

Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) continues to gain popularity as the top alternative to conventional trenching. The flexibility of HDD to drill below streets, highways, rivers, environmentally sensitive areas such as wetlands, and other obstacles — with minimal disturbance to the surface above makes HDD an ideal solution for the installation of gas, electric, telecommunications and water/sewer lines for utility companies.

How it works

HDD utilizes specially designed drill bits, continuous sections of drill pipe and survey equipment to accomplish horizontal drilling. Once the drill bit and pipe are underground, they can be steered within certain limits. Once the bit resurfaces at the goal point, a reaming bit is placed on the end of the drill pipe. When pulled through the existing pilot hole, this processes is called pre-reaming and allows sequentially larger reamers to be used to prepare the bore hole for pipe insertion. Pre-reaming may be repeated multiple times to provide the correct hole diameter and stabilization. After pre-reaming has been completed, the drill head is then connected to the pipeline or conduit via a specialized pulling head and is pulled through the bore hole to the start point, completing the job. During this entire process, guidance information is relayed to the drill operator via a wire-line locating system. Additionally JMF uses a down-hole data logging package, allowing us to monitor multiple drilling parameters, including hole pressures in real time. This monitoring helps prevent tooling failure, and mitigate irregular dis-charges. This real time data can be live streamed to any internet connected office allowing inspectors to monitor the progress without being on-site.

PA One Call

Safety is vitially important to JMF Underground. Before every dig, we take the proper measures by calling PA One Call.